Credit: Gameverse Paulina PabisEyes: The Horror Game wastes little time. It offers just enough narrative to let you know you're a burglar, then it shoves you into a tenebrous chamber with one goal in mind: collect twenty bags of cash. Before you know it, you're using the incredibly functional play control to meander down an adjacent hallway, where you run afoul of an ominous crimson eyeball peering at you from a wall. A cautionary approach and a light tap upon the ocular organ reveal that it's actually an item that allows you to "see," whatever the hell that means...
So you humor the game and poke the eye icon in the upper left corner of the screen. The camera transitions and at first it would appear that you're tripping balls. Suddenly you're apparently moving down another hallway, the walls flashing a variety of nauseating colors. You recognize the scene before you, because you were just there a few seconds ago. The camera flashes back to you and you're staring down the corridor that appeared to you in the vision, peering at the location that was just blinking magenta and aqua. Your stomach turns because it dawns on you that you were "seeing" through another entity's eyes. Then a word appears on the screen:
RUN!
...and RUN! you do, with a stride so strong that you feel as though Matt Smith should be right beside you. In fact, you pad so quickly that you inadvertently sprint into a corner. You spin around to grant yourself release and that's when you see her: a floating, disembodied female head with two rows of needles for teeth and a pair of blank, scarlet eyes. The meat beneath her chin is ragged and uneven, as if her noggin had been painfully torn off her body rather than cleaved. Red strands of flesh--possibly arteries or intestines--dangle from her stump, connected to a couple of remaining organs.
Credit: Gameverse Paulina PabisThen there's you: black robber clothing and an even darker circle forming around your crotch region.
The specter moves in for the kill, the camera closes in on her terrible visage and fades to black, with the only death scene forming in the darkest reaches of your imagination...
Getting caught for the first time is the most memorable part of Eyes. It's not just beholding the nightmarish countenance that gets to you, but the fact that you weren't expecting it to be so horrific. Unfortunately, nothing can help you to forget that face or the myriad razors attached to it. With repeated failures, the monster becomes commonplace and you eventually learn to stop screaming like a frightened schoolgirl. So you decide you're going to search the premises and see if you can find anything noteworthy.
Nothing doing, sadly...
Although Eyes is comparable to Slender: The Eight Pages, it differs greatly in the depth of its environment. Eyes only offers a few floors of a massive domicile--all of which is pretty easy to search--and doesn't manage to make any of it worthwhile or interesting. You'll find scores of desks and bookcases that would have made great hiding places for items in less Slender-ish titles, but there's little to interact with. Sure, you can find a key to a cell in the basement and a combination for a safe, but these extras don't add much to what's already a dangerously shallow game.
Before long, avoiding Ms. Evil Otto becomes a chore. The instant you receive the message, all you need to do is jog the opposite direction or duck into a room. Maybe it was just me, but it seemed like the ghost didn't know how to open doors and enter rooms, so you had several safe havens throughout the mansion.
Credit: Gameverse Paulina PabisAlthough it features a very creepy antagonist, Eyes doesn't sport enough decent features to warrant playing it extensively. What you have is a bite-sized Slender that's far easier to finish such that the game loses its fear factor. There's only so much wandering around a house and glimpsing the same miscellany an individual can endure before he's forced to uninstall the product and forget about it completely.
In all honesty, you can do much worse than Eyes: The Horror Game. It won't hurt to download and play for an afternoon, so long as you bear in mind that it doesn't have much longevity. However, without any real standout features, you can also do much better--even at a free price tag--than Eyes.
